20th Century Topics & Ideas

If the names of the most prominant 20th century thinkers are foreign to you, you can use the topics list to the left. Two broad categories within which many topics fall are often described as the Continental tradition, which includes the existentialists, the phenomenologists, structuralists, post-structuralists, the critical theorists, the theoretical feminists, the psychologists, the post-modernists and deconstructionists. The other broad category is the American/British Analytic tradition, which includes the philosophers of mind, the scientific epistemologists, the neopragmatists, the logical positivists, and the ordinary language philosophers. Other philosophical movements, such as Objectivism, seem to belong in their own catagories.